


Like My Mother Before Me

by damaskrose



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Fate & Destiny, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Other, Pre-Canon, Rebellion, Training, gratuitous joan of arc references because of who i am as a person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 08:05:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17158322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damaskrose/pseuds/damaskrose
Summary: Enfys Nest didn't believe in the Force.





	Like My Mother Before Me

**Author's Note:**

> December felt empty without a new movie, so I wrote about everyone's favorite teen girl marauder rebel and her complicated relationship with the Force! And yes, the title is a play on Luke's "I am a Jedi, like my father before me" because I'm desperate for Star Wars to have a mother-daughter legacy relationship and I took what I could get from Enfys mentioning her mother.

Enfys Nest didn't believe in the Force. 

She didn’t believe the legends that said there was some magical force pulling them along and guiding actions. There was no such thing as prophecies and fabled heroes, no destinies. No. The future was what you carved from the present, what you gripped tight in your hands and refused to let go.

Her mother had taught her that, so many years ago. She had been a child and obsessed with the tales of the Jedi. In the spare moments of rest as they bounced between planets, the Galactic Empire hot on their heels and her mother constantly called away to conference and raid with the Cloud Riders she’d pored over the few ancient, flickering holos of their ancient lore she’d scrounged together. She’d soaked up the idea that the whole world was just a vast, galactic game board for forces playing with far higher stakes than a few credits, wondering if it could possibly be true. 

The idea terrified her and enthralled her in equal parts like the dry storms that swirled across desert planets in the windy season, sand frantically whipped higher than flimsy shanty homes and the sky rent by blazing heat and holts of thunder. 

That all came to an end the when Enfys was ten and her mother found her poring over a fuzzy holo explaining the workings of the Force instead of tending to her swoop bike. She hadn't knocked the holo from Enfys's hand or raised her voice.

No, Gymyla Nest had simply stood in the doorway of the tent until her daughter looked up and guiltily snapped the holo off. 

"Get up," was all her mother had said. "Get your staff. We're going into to the desert."

And Enfys had quietly done what her mother said. Not because she was scared of any punishment, but because she couldn’t tell what emotions were roiling behind her mother’s dark eyes–anger or fear or disappointment or some awful combination of them all.

She asked no questions as she fetched her staff and trekked through endless hills of sand towards the horizon, and her mother offered no answers. Her staff was still unfamiliar and unwieldy in her hands, the strap digging painfully into her back. But she didn’t complain. A staff was the weapon of a Nest woman, the weapon of her mother. 

They walked in silence as the sun lowered in the sky and melted, softly golden, across the waves of sand like butter in a skillet. It would be pitch-dark in a few hours, Enfys knew, the stifling heat receding in the place of frost and sweat freezing on her skin. But the set of her mother's shoulders told her they would not be turning back until they had completed what they came for.

At last they stopped, seemingly at random, and her mother plunged her staff into the sand. "Enfys," she said, and her voice was so heavy with something like so regret that the hair on the back of Enfys's neck stood up.

"What?" The staff stood between them like a sentry. Like a wall. Like the answer a question she didn't even want to ask.

“Try to disarm me." Her mother pulled the staff from the ground and held it steady.

“Why?” The request was so sudden that her question came out tinged with a laugh. Enfys had never had to practice with her staff–it was more of a symbol, like her mother’s mask. Blasters were the real weapons of defense and attack when she needed them.

"Disarm me," her mother said again, gesturing slightly with the staff in her hand. The dying rays of the sun gilded her, caressed the edges of her face and making her look like a warrior-goddess from a myth. But her eyes were shadowed.

"Okay," Enfys said doubtfully. She had only been given the staff a few weeks ago ( _ just in case _ her mother had said, and even as a child Enfys had been able to recognize how it was really her mother admitting that her staff might not always be there to knock enemies away). The weight, the grip, the sound it made rushing through the air–all of it was still unfamiliar to her.

She slung the staff of her shoulder and swung it half-heartedly out, fearing she might catch her mother with the weighted end and harm her. But before her staff could finish its weak little arc through the air, she felt a hard jab at her knees as her legs were knocked out from under her. She stumbled to the ground in a tangle of work clothes and sand, landing hard.

She expected her mother's sympathetic face to come into view, but all that came was a hard hand thrusted out to her. "Get up."

She took the offered hand and did so, wincing at the fresh welt on her leg and the knowledge of the bruise that would come.

Her mother leaned against her own staff. "Again."

"What?" Now it was incredulous. What purpose could this possibly serve? They'd never make it back before night fell, at this rate. But the weary look in her mother's eyes made her choke back all her protests.

Her mother motioned towards Enfys's fallen staff. "Again."

So she hauled her staff up and weighed it her hands again, judging  for the best place to aim. This time, she lasted a good two seconds more before her back made acquaintance with the gritty, cooling sand.

"Again." This time there was no hand offered.

"Again." Her voice had no more emotion than a broken-down accounting droid.

"Again."

"Again."

"Again."

By the eighth attempt, Enfys had had enough. Her body was battered and there was sand down her neck and it was too dark out. She didn’t even try when her mother's staff swept from behind and sent her sprawling.

"What," Enfys spat, feeling the grit of sand beneath her tongue, anger and confusion tangling her stomach in an impossible knot, "Are we  _ doing _ ?"

Gymyla tossed her staff aside with one fierce, sudden movement like a snake rising to strike. “No one is going to save you, Enfys." The words could have been a threat, but the way she said them–heavy with sorrow and regret–they sounded more like a eulogy. "When you get knocked down, no mystic hand is going to keep you from falling.”

Enfys knew now that the look in her mother’s eyes had not been disappointment. It had been regret for the necessity of arming her only daughter for war. 

She opened her mouth instinctively to protest. "I don't..." but trailed off before she could finish the sentence.  _ I don't what? I don't dream that there's another world behind the dusty skin of the sky? I don't hope that I'm a tiny piece slotted into some mystic puzzle? I don't pray for a cosmic scale that will keep the world balanced? _

They wouldn't have been lies, exactly. But neither would they have tasted of the truth. And her mother would have seen how falsely they hung in the dark desert air between them.

_ But how do you know? _ Some rebellious spark flared within in her and she almost jabbed out, demanding proof. How could her mother know that they were alone? 

But she already knew the answers. In the way her mother sometimes reached for someone who was nothing but air and in the world that had forced generations of woman to take up the mask and the staff to fight for justice. The answer were there in dusty poverty and the greedy overlords who drained it ever drier. In the distant looming shadow of the Empire. In the army swarming across the galaxy, hard-shelled and numerous as beetles.

How could any cosmic force of balance ever allow the scale to tip so?

“Enfys, my love.” The shadow of her mother's smile was sweet and sorrowful. “I don't tell you this to crush your spirit. I don't. I tell you this so you will know there will be no one to catch you when you fall, but that should never stop you from climbing higher. Be your own net.”

Gymyla tightened her hands around her staff and stood in the darkened desert, rooted steady as a mountain. She was always steady–her hand, her eyes, her heart. No matter if she was in the thick of battle, lasers screaming past her ears, or watching the sun melt beneath the dark crust of the horizon. Unshakable. Enfys knew she didn’t look much like her mother–she had her father’s red curls and freckles, not her mother’s cropped dark hair and warm brown skin–but she hoped that one day she would have the same steadiness. 

“And sometimes, Enfys, you need to be able to knock others down from their heights.” Her gaze focused back on her daughter and the staff in her trembling hands instead of whatever distance her gaze had been focused on–a long-lost face or one of the dozens of cities they had briefly settled in and then slipped out from before they could be tracked. Or other, older sorrows Enfys had no part in knowing. “That is why I wear the mask, why I push the scales even. We must make our own fate. And some day, should you wear the mask–”

“No,” Enfys blurted out before she could stop herself.  _ No _ because her mother was the only one who wore the mask.  _ No _ because the day it settled across her own face meant it was the day her mother was no longer there to bear it. And she could not imagine such a thing.

Her mother's eyes softened. “Enfys, I do not mean to hurt you. Only prepare you for a world that will not sheath it's claws. Don't bury your head in the sand. There is no guarantee of survival in this world.” She rested a hand–heavy, comforting, on her daughter's shoulder. Dropped it.

“Again.”

By the time the two of them returned to the Cloud Rider base, Enfys was bruised and raw from desert sand and the weight of her mother's staff. Her arms burnt from the effort. It felt good. It felt powerful.

Almost a decade later, Enfys ran her fingers along her staff–a new one, the original splintered in the heat of battle years ago, but the same steady weight, the same reminder. A staff was a very particular weapon, she had learned. Not like a blaster or a bomb, distant and destructive. No, a staff was close-range, metal against flesh, your enemy's gasping breath in your ear. A staff was a desperate weapon for when you could not fend them off any further. For when you had to take things into your own hands.

Her breath echoed back against her skin, moist and warm, beneath the mask. Savareen's familiar heat settled across her, in the folds of her armor and the metal of her swoop bike. So like the desert planet her mother had trained her on–the same collapsing shacks and sun-aged residents, the same story of exploitation, the same woman in a mask.

And yet, beneath the surface, everything had changed. 

Benthic approached her, the Cloud Rider limping slightly from an earlier battle. “You talked with the Empire deserter?”

Edgy looked across the golden sand to where the smuggler's ship gleamed beneath the harsh sun. “Yes. He's not coming with us.”

Benthic sighed. He had been with the Cloud Riders since the days of her mother the exhale had all the exhaustion of decades of pursuit and battle with the Empire, of failures and victories alike. “A pity, he could have been a help.”

“It doesn’t matter. The rebellion is strong without him.” Coaxium, Dryden Vos–none of it mattered in the long run. What mattered was the rag-tag group of rebels slowly coalescing in the overlooked corners of the galaxy. If he was worth having, he would find his own path to the rebellion somehow. If not, they were better off without him. 

Really, it wasn’t true to say that Enfys didn't believe in the Force. Maybe there  _ was _ some divine tide carrying them all along and setting them on a destined path. Maybe a simple farm girl would listen to the singing of the current and be urged to raise her hand against the Empire in prophesied victory. Maybe the Jedi would rise again. Maybe one day higher forces would reach down and tip the world back into balance.

But it wasn’t helping enough. She didn’t care if one day an ancient Jedi order could be resurrected to topple the Empire or the Force would nudge them all along to a far-future victory. She cared about the  _ now,  _ about those crushed and suffering beneath the heel of the Empire.

_ Fate _ didn’t matter. What mattered was that you spurred yourself to action rather than waiting for a divine voice to echo in your skull and urge your weapon hand into motion.

What mattered was dragging yourself, spluttering and wet, from the slowly eroding tides of fate, and making your own future. Like her mother before her. Like all the Nest women in the mask before her.

Enfys planted staff firmly in the desert sands the way her mother had years ago, the way generations of woman before her had. “Never mind the deserter. We have work to do.”

**Author's Note:**

> My phone tried to autocorrect "Savareen" to "Sacramento" so you're lucky I didn't just scrap the whole thing and write a Lady Bird AU!
> 
> Also, Gymyla means "cloud" in Welsh because apparently Enfys means "rainbow" and I thought it would be a fun parallel.


End file.
